News:

"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

Agelbert NOTE: When it comes to fossil fuels, the EIA is ALWAYS predicting higher prices and rosy growth. They have been consistently wrong. They are so tainted by fossil fuel love that ANY prediction the U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes for fossil fuels is always going to be exaggerated and Renewable Energy downplayed.

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

LONDON, Sept 13 (Reuters) – The global oil market will show a surplus into next year, as an abrupt deterioration in demand growth meets rising supply, pushing world inventories to yet another record high and confounding the previous expectations of leading energy agencies.

The International Energy Agency on Tuesday forecast global supply would outpace demand well into next year, marking an about-face from its assessment just one month ago that the market would essentially show no surplus for the remainder of this year.

Similarly, a monthly report from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries on Monday showed the world’s largest producers expect their non-OPEC rivals to pump even faster, suggesting a hefty surplus may be on the cards in 2017.

“Our forecast in this month’s report suggests that this supply-demand dynamic may not change significantly in the coming months. As a result, supply will continue to outpace demand at least through the first half of next year,” the IEA said.

Global refinery runs are expected to grow at their slowest pace in at least a decade this year, which will curb appetite for crude oil, just as inventories across the OECD rose to a fresh record high of 3.111 billion barrels, the report said.

“With our more pessimistic outlook for the second half of 2016 refining activity and revisions to crude supply, the expected draws in the third quarter of 2016 are now lower, while the build in the fourth quarter of 2016 is higher,” the IEA said.

Global demand growth is slowing at a faster pace than the group initially predicted. The IEA left its forecast for demand growth for 2017 unchanged from its prediction in June at 1.2 million barrels per day, but cut its forecast for 2016 consumption growth to 1.3 million bpd, from 1.4 million.

“The key demand change in this report is the erosion of 300,000 bpd from the third quarter of 2016’s global demand estimate, and the resulting removal of 100,000 bpd from the net 2016 forecast,” the IEA said.

Brent crude oil futures fell by around 2 percent on Tuesday to $47.30 a barrel, still showing a 70-percent gain so far this year, but about half where it was two years ago.

Despite oil’s collapse and resulting investment cuts, global oil production is still expanding, although nowhere near the breakneck pace of 2015. High-cost OPEC producers have been hit particularly hard.

However, the loss has been more than made up for by OPEC. Saudi Arabia and Iran have each raised oil output by over 1 million barrels a day since late 2014 when OPEC shifted strategy to defend market share rather than price.

OPEC forecast demand for its oil will average 32.48 million bpd in 2017, down 530,000 bpd from its previous forecast.

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“It seems the situation has deteriorated strongly in the eyes of OPEC as well as the IEA,” Commerzbank head of commodities strategy Eugen Weinberg said.,

“.. That we are in the third quarter of 2016 and we won’t see the ‘balancing-out’ over the next six months is definitely a major change,” he said.

Near-record OPEC output, and higher supply from outside, could make it harder for OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, and rival Russia to come up with steps to support the market. Producers are expected to meet in Algeria on the sidelines of the Sept. 26-28 International Energy Forum. (Reporting by Amanda Cooper; Editing by Louise Heavens and William Hardy)

(Bloomberg) — Offshore oil-rig operators, grappling with the biggest industry downturn in a generation, say they finally have the bottom in sight. The problem is, they could be stuck there for a long time.

Transocean Ltd., which owns the biggest offshore-rig fleet in the world, believes utilization for floating units will reach bottom toward the middle of next year, Chief Financial Officer Mark Mey said at a conference organized by Pareto Securities ASA in Oslo. Seadrill Ltd., which owns the third-largest fleet, said utilization could stabilize as soon as the beginning of next year, and that rental rates had already bottomed out.

Still, it’s impossible to say when those rates, which have dropped to about $200,000 a day from highs of $650,000 in 2013 for the most sophisticated units, will recover, said Seadrill Chief Executive Officer Per Wullf and Tom Kellock, a senior consultant at IHS Markit Ltd.

“We don’t know where demand is going, and that’s a reflection of the oil price,” Kellock said in an interview. “Rates are going to come back more slowly than oil prices because of the overhang and the degree of competition and the oversupply of rigs, which is not at this stage being tackled.”

Offshore drillers have been pounded by the collapse in crude prices in the past two years as oil companies slashed spending to protect their cash flow and shareholder payouts. Their predicament has been exacerbated by a wave of new rigs coming into the market that were ordered when demand was strong. Rig operators have reduced costs dramatically, but still have had to cut dividends, defer delivery of vessels and suspend or scrap existing ones.Bottoming Out

The number of floating rigs on contract and working is expected to fall to about 120 in the middle of 2017 from about 160 currently, Transocean’s Mey said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. It could take as long as a year before utilization bottoms out, IHS Markit’s Kellock said. As many as 60 more floaters need to be permanently scrapped, according to both Seadrill and IHS Markit.

While Seadrill said utilization rates will need to reach 70 percent across the industry before rates start improving, Transocean and IHS Markit estimated 85 percent. Regardless, a recovery depends on higher, more stable oil prices, Ensco Plc Chief Financial Officer Jon Baksht, said during a presentation at the conference Wednesday.

“You’ll have flat utilization” from the beginning of next year with operators “hunting” for work, Wullf said in an interview. “Then it’s a matter of the oil price.”

Longer GlutWhile oil has recovered from the 12-year lows it reached in January, the International Energy Agency said this week that a global glut will last longer than previously expected, persisting into late 2017 as demand growth slows and supply keeps up, driven by record output from OPEC.

For costly ultra-deepwater rigs, utilization rates of 70 percent won’t be reached until 2018 at the earliest, said Andrew Cosgrove, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “I agree rates are definitely at or near bottom, but we’re going to be walking along the ‘bottom of the bathtub’ for a while.”

An extended period at the bottom looks especially threatening for Seadrill, which has the industry’s heaviest debt load, with about $9 billion at the end of the second quarter. The company, controlled by billionaire John Fredriksen, is currently negotiating with its 42 banks before it can be able to include bondholders, Wullf said at the conference. The company aims to have a solution in place by early December, he said.

LONDON—A revolution is taking place in the global energy sector, with investments in oil and gas declining by 25% in 2015 while energy produced from renewables rose by more than 30%.

“We have never seen such a decline [in oil and gas investment]”, said Dr Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), at the London launch of its first ever report into world energy investment.

“Our findings carry a very important message for climate change and for the Paris agreement. Anyone who does not understand what is going on—governments, companies, markets—is not in the right place.”

Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energies is seen as vital in the battle against climate change.

The IEA, which focuses on issues of energy security, says that overall investment in the global energy sector declined by 8% in 2015 to US$1.8 trillion.

Fossil fuels products

In part, the decline in investments in oil and gas was due to the lower costs of crude oil and other products of the fossil fuels industry.

Although investment in renewables has been more or less the same in each of the last four years, increased efficiencies and lower capital costs resulted in a third more electricity being produced from these technologies in 2015.

“A major shift in investment towards low carbon sources of power generation is under way,” the IEA report says. “Fossil fuels continue to dominate energy supply, but the composition of investment flows points to a reordering of the system.”

Lazlo Varro, an IEA renewables expert, says the sector needed less and less in government subsidies as costs come down. Over the last five years, the price of solar energy dropped by 80%, while wind power’s costs dropped by a third overall.

Varro says that offshore wind power—traditionally seen as expensive—was becoming more price-competitive as turbine sizes increase and more efficient construction methods are used. Low interest rates were also encouraging more investment in renewables.

Nuclear energy is seen by some as an important ingredient in tackling climate-changing carbon emissions.

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Fossil fuels continue to dominate energy supply, but the composition of investment flows points to a reordering of the system

The IEA says the drop in the price of renewables has not been reflected in the nuclear sector—rather, the reverse. And there are continuing worries about nuclear safety and the disposal of nuclear materials.

For those hoping for a bright new dawn of carbon-free energy, the IEA report has some sobering news: there are continuing large-scale investments in coal—the most polluting of fuels. More than US$60 billion was invested in coal projects last year, most of it in Asia and in Australia.

Many of the coal plants constructed are described as sub-critical—severely polluting, and using only basic technology.

The continued investment in coal was often due to the lack of the necessary infrastructure to support other, cleaner energy systems in countries such as India and Indonesia, and to the failure of governments to back renewables.Energy spending

China continues to be the world’s biggest producer and consumer of coal, although the IEA says 60% of the country’s total energy spending last year was on renewables.

The IEA predicts that investment in fossil fuels is likely to continue to fall in the years ahead, particularly in the oil industry. But the energy sector—especially transport—will remain dependent on oil and gas.

The liquefied natural gas (LNG) market will grow substantially, and countries in the Middle East and Russia will continue to expand their oil production.

The IEA welcomes the shift in investment to renewable forms of energy, but says new oil production needs to come on stream in order to meet international energy demand.

Production from oil fields around the world is declining, and Birol says: “Every second year we lose [the equivalent of] one Iraq due to the decline in oil field production. This is worrying from an IEA perspective.”

Kieran Cooke, a founding editor of Climate News Network, is a former foreign correspondent for the BBC and Financial Times. He now focuses on environmental issues.

Oil prices tumbled about 4 percent on Friday on signs Saudi Arabia and arch rival Iran were making little progress in achieving preliminary agreement ahead of talks by major crude exporters next week aimed at freezing production.

Also weighing on sentiment was data showing the United States was on track to add the most number of oil rigs in a quarter since the crude price crash began two years ago. Lower equity prices on Wall Street and other world stock markets was another bearish factor. [RIG/U] [.N] [MKTS/GLOB]

Brent crude oil LCOc1 was down $1.88, or 4 percent, at $45.77 a barrel by 1:41 p.m. EDT (1741 GMT). It was flat on the week after showing a weekly gain of 4 percent earlier.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude CLc1 was down $1.94, or 4.2 percent, at $44.38. On the week, WTI showed a gain of 3 percent.

Crude futures slumped after sources said Saudi Arabia did not expect a decision in Algeria where the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other big oil producers are set to convene for the Sept 26-28 talks.

"The Algeria meeting is not a decision making meeting. It is for consultations," a source familiar with Saudi oil officials' thinking told Reuters.

Earlier in the day, Brent and WTI were on track to their largest weekly gain in more than a month after Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia had offered to reduce production if Iran caps its own output this year.

Oil prices are typically volatile ahead of OPEC talks and Friday's session was tempered with caution despite market sentiment on a high this week after the U.S. government reported on Wednesday a third straight weekly drop in crude stockpiles. [EIA/S]

The talks in Algeria are OPEC's second attempt to reach an agreement on production curbs, after a failed effort in May. The market has been skeptical of OPEC's commitment, though, as key members of the group, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria, have been pumping at optimum levels to protect market share. [OPEC/M]

Russia, the world's largest oil exporter and a key participant at the Algeria talks, also hit record highs in production this week.

(Additional reporting by Sabina Zawadzki and Libby George in LONDON and Henning Gloystein; in SINGAPORE; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Bernadette Baum)

Since the start of the week, various oil and gas companies have already announced significant offshore job cuts across the industry, affecting different parts of the globe.

The move follows the continued challenges hitting the oil and gas industry as well as the uncertainty surrounding the evolution of crude oil prices.

The list of companies reducing their taskforce includes Technip, Petronas, Boskalis, Farstad and Shell and their decisions should impact different continents.

Offshore Job Slash Continues Across the Industry

Royal Boskalis Westminster started the trend after announcing it is moving ahead with plans to take a series of vessels out of service and lay off hundreds of workers.

Over the next two years, the company will see 24 vessels taken out of service, which is expected to result in the loss of 650 jobs worldwide.

On Monday, Technip also announced it is set to cut 130 jobs in Aberdeen. The company is undergoing consultation on the redundacies, with proposals that reflect “significantly reduced activity levels being experienced” across the industry.

Shell is shedding jobs in Norway

In Malaysia, Petronas is also reportedly planning to cut down its workforce by several hundreds as it continues to struggle with low oil prices.

In March, the firm had already implemented a restructuring, which resulted in redundancies of around 1,000 jobs.

Norway Affected by Job Cuts

Further East, in Australia, Farstad Shipping also announced job cuts following the closure of its Melbourne office, shedding from 65 to 30 employees as it moves all its activities to Perth.

Back in Europe, Shell had already warned that its merger with the BG Group would lead to thousands of offshore job cuts across its global operations. The company will now implement a reduction of 145 positions.

As well as this, according to media reports, the supermajor confirmed it will also discontinue 110 contractor agreements, on top of those 145 positions.

However, Shell is not the only firm to take the leap in Norway. FMC Technologies and Aker Solutions are also reportedly shedding jobs in the North European country, laying off 200 and 100 offshore workers, respectively.

German coal-fired power plant closures are poised to accelerate as dwindling margins prompt utilities to retire the stations early.

A quarter of hard coal-fired generation capacity in Europe’s largest economy may shut ahead of schedule if plant operators forgo spending on upgrades to keep aging stations open, according to Nena AS, an Oslo-based energy consulting firm. Steag GmbH, the nation’s fifth-biggest power producer, is considering shuttering at least five of its 13 German coal stations before plan, Juergen Froehlich, a spokesman for the utility, said by e-mail.

As German coal plant profitability lingers near its lowest levels in at least five years, other utilities may follow Steag, helping ease a surplus of generating capacity exacerbated by the rise of renewable energy, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. While utilities have shut about 18 percent of Germany’s current hard coal-fired capacity since 2011, only 9 percent more is slated to close through 2019, according to consultants Pira Energy.

“You have a lot of old hard-coal plants in Germany and you need to take investment decisions now if you want to continue operating them,” Bengt Longva, a senior analyst at Nena, said by phone.

Dark Spread

The clean-dark spread, a measure of coal-plant profitability, for next month in Germany dropped 57 percent in the past 12 months to EU2.80 per megawatt hour, a third of the five-year average for this time of year, according to broker data compiled by Bloomberg. At the same time, gas-fired generation margins have recovered to 2.86 euros per megawatt hour from minus 8 euros.

“We have seen some resilience for coal, but dark spreads have been narrowing and along the curve I don’t see how these units will be running next year,” said Bruno Brunetti, a director of electricity at Pira in New York. “Recovery of costs is now becoming a real issue.”

While fuel prices have risen this year, coal has climbed faster than natural gas. This spurred a 15 percent jump in German gas-fired generation as of July, compared with a decline of 16 percent in hard-coal plant output, according to German utility lobby BDEW. Hard coal makes up about 18 percent of the country’s generation.

Even with German power prices slumping the lowest in more than a decade, total installed generation capacity has increased by more than 50 percent to 195 gigawatts since 2006 due to the surge in renewables, according to the Fraunhofer ISE research institute. Fossil fuel-plant capacity fell 11 percent in the same period. A gigawatt is enough to power 2 million European homes.

“The industry is reacting at last,” Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a Sept. 13 note. More utilities may follow Steag’s move, “further improving the outlook for supply and demand,” they wrote.

In addition to Steag’s mooted closures of some of its own plants, the utility and RWE AG, Germany’s largest electricity producer, decided to shut their co-owned Voerde A and Voerde B coal units by April next year.

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“What’s happening in Germany is a game of chicken,” said Andreas Gandolfo, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in London. “If someone else shuts their power plant first, you benefit.”

What happens to demand for oil in a deep global recession? It tends to plummet, and unless production falls by the same amount, then price tends to plummet as well, as supply stays stubbornly higher than cratering demand.

These two nuclear options could strike the global economy even without any planning. Once the global economy tips into recession, oil may fall under its own weight and the dollar may gain ground as other currencies fall.

However, at the moment the oil predatory crooks and liars are following their time honored scare tactics to jack up the price of crude based on Hurricane Matthew's projected supply interruption.

As usual, they jack up the price BEFORE any damage has occurred and are slow as a snail in molasses to lower it when demand continues to evaporate. The fossil fuel industry CROOKS have a cute term for this "phenomenon": They claim that prices are "inelastic" on the way down and "elastic" on the way up.

Oh, the pliability of the English language.

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

Something significant happened on Friday that warrants more than just a few column inches in a newspaper. AGREED

With the most divisive presidential election in U.S. history just days away from concluding, it is easy to understand why more is not being made of the news, but just to tell you something seismic happened on Friday last week.

The world's largest listed oil company, Exxon, announced that it was going to have to cut its reported proved reserves by just under a fifth—by 19 percent.

It would be the biggest reserve revision in the history of the oil industry. It is yet another sign that Big Oil is in big trouble.

The Chicago Tribune:

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"Big oil companies have been solid investments for years, with a deceptively simple business model: Find at least as much new oil as you sell, book those barrels as future sales and reinvest in the hunt for new reserves. That made sense as long as oil prices went up, but it locked companies into a vicious cycle of replenishment, leading them to search for ever more extreme, and expensive, sources of crude oil in the Arctic and beneath the oceans."

And it added:

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"Cheap oil has stopped that business cold and the threat of climate action raises fundamental questions about whether it'll ever be viable again."

Agelbert NOTE: For those magical thinking fossil fuelers who think this will help the Big Oil crooks and liars to jack up the price of fossil fuels, I can only pity your descent into straw grasping wishful thinking. Demand destruction is NOT going to go away. The Fossil Fuel "Industry" will disappear in disgrace if logic and sanity prevails.

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

Oil Tankers Used to Store Millions of Barrels at Sea as Land Sites Fill

November 11, 2016 by Bloomberg

By Alex Longley

(Bloomberg) — Oil companies booked tankers to store as many as 9 million barrels of crude in northwest Europe amid signs that space in on-land depots is filling up, a ship-operator said. The glut could get bigger still, given the region is scheduled to load the most cargoes in 4 1/2 years next month.

There are 14 to 16 Aframax-class tankers now storing crude in the region, Jonathan Lee, chief executive officer of Tankers International, operator of the world’s biggest pool of supertankers, said by phone Friday. Standard cargoes are normally almost 600,000 barrels. Lack of on-land capacity to hold the oil is the most likely cause of the buildup, he said.

North Sea producers are among a long list of suppliers adding barrels just as OPEC prepares to try and eliminate a surplus. Pressure on the exporter club is piling up because its own members are pumping like never before while nations outside the group including Brazil, Kazakhstan, Canada and Russia are producing more than ever or pumping from new fields.

Traders began looking for profit at sea again earlier this month, according to a Bloomberg survey, with Tankers International saying at the time that between five and 10 ships had been chartered to hold oil near Singapore, most likely to profit from weak crude prices.

Doing the Contango

Those ships are the industry’s biggest supertankers, holding 2 million barrels a piece. The vessels in the North Sea would normally carry about 70 percent less oil.

Oversupply in the oil market has caused a key oil-price spread that denotes the scale of any surplus to balloon. The difference in the price of January and February Brent contracts rose to $1.18 a barrel this week, the widest since April 2015, excluding days when the price expires.

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When the month-on-month discount gets deep enough — something called contango — it sometimes rewards traders to hire ships, keep hold of the oil, and sell it at the later price, because the gap more than covers the cost of booking a vessel.

Other times, there just isn’t space to unload, forcing vessels to wait. Inventories in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp are the highest for the time of year since at least 2013, according to data from Genscape Inc.

“The big question is whether it’s contango or whether it’s a lack of physical land-based storage” that’s caused the storage buildup in Northwest Europe, London-based Lee said. “It seems to be the latter at the moment.”

The Brent price spreads collapsed because supplies are being pushed onto the market that were previously unavailable.

Libya shipped the most oil since late 2014 in October, while Nigeria’s petroleum minister said the nation is now pumping more than 2 million barrels a day for the first time since the start of the year. That is in addition to new supply from Kazakhstan’s Kashagan oil field and Russian output at a post-Soviet record.

(Bloomberg) — The offshore fleet tending to Norway’s oil industry, already sailing through the worst downturn in a generation, is in for even more pain, according to the head of the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association.

Almost one in four offshore vessels, or about 140 units, and half of the floating rigs, or about 20 units, are now out of work, Chief Executive Officer Sturla Henriksen said. He sees that going “from bad to worse” over the next year, with as many as three in four rigs idled by the end of 2017 and no real recovery in sight.

“It’s a highly challenging situation, but it will get worse,” he said in an interview in his Oslo office on Tuesday. “It will still be bad two to three years from now, and maybe longer.”

There will only be demand for 14 of about 40 floating rigs in Norway next year, Jarand Rystad, managing partner of consultancy Rystad Energy AS, said at a conference in Stavanger Wednesday, echoing Henriksen’s forecast.

More than two years after crude prices started to collapse, oil companies worldwide have cut spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, decimating demand for services from drillers, seismic surveyors and supply vessels. Norway, western Europe’s biggest oil and gas producer and home to one of the world’s biggest offshore fleets, has been battered by the downturn. The industry has cut more than 40,000 jobs since 2014 and the government resorted to the first-ever withdrawal from its massive wealth fund to cover budget needs.

Cash Lifeline

Henriksen’s grim predictions echo comments from analysts and companies such as Seadrill Ltd., owner of the world’s third-biggest offshore rig fleet. While utilization rates for floating rigs could reach a bottom as soon as the beginning of next year, it’s impossible to say when rental rates would recover, Seadrill CEO Per Wullf said in September.

And many contracts signed before the downturn are now expiring, meaning a crucial cash-flow lifeline will be lost as deals are at best re-negotiated at rates near operational costs, Henriksen said.

“It’s now starting to bite in such a way that the structural consequences are coming,” he said. “We’re going to see changes both in the ownership structure and for the companies. We’re going to see fewer and bigger units, with other ownership constellations than we’ve seen before.”

Norway billionaire Kjell Inge Rokke pushed through a merger of supply vessel company Solstad Offshore ASA with rival Rem Offshore ASA in July after blocking a restructuring proposal in a bondholder vote. Rokke’s Aker has made clear that it has an appetite for further deals as it bets on a recovery of oil and oil-service markets in the coming years.

Statoil Monopoly

The plight of the Norwegian oil-service industry has been exacerbated by the dominant position of Statoil ASA, said Henriksen, who has previously criticized the state-controlled oil producer for squeezing suppliers by demanding price cuts to unsustainable levels. Norwegian authorities should remove management of Statoil’s state-ownership from the Petroleum and Energy Ministry, which also acts as the industry’s regulator, as well as reduce the 70 percent of the country’s oil and gas fields that it currently operates, he said.

“Statoil acts as the monopolist that it is,” Henriksen said. It “wields that power for everything that it’s worth, in a way that may serve Statoil in the short term but that has major consequences for Norway’s entire service industry.”

The Shipowners’ Association, which represents numerous owners of transportation vessels, is also concerned about the U.S. election win of Donald Trump because the implementation of some of the candidate’s campaign pledges would have grave consequences for the health of the world economy, Henriksen said.

“There’s a deep concern linked to the uncertainty and unpredictability that he has created,” he said. “For an industry that has a symbiotic relationship with international trade and global economic development — partly driven by it and partly a premise for it — there’s not much encouragement to get from a candidate who has built his campaign on protectionism and nationalism.”

ReutersSEOUL, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Samsung Heavy Industries Co Ltd said on Friday that a 907.6 billion won ($776.8 million) order for a substructure for a liquefied natural gas (LNG) floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit has been cancelled.

The South Korean shipbuilder said in a regulatory filing that the order, which came from an unspecified European firm, was cancelled as the firm did not issue a work order by a deadline agreed upon.

A Samsung Heavy spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.

BARCELONA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When it comes to climate change and the battle to keep it in check, 2016 was a year of extremes.

The euphoria of the super-fast entry into force of the Paris Agreement to curb global warming crashed days later with the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, fuelling fears he may pull the world's second-largest emitting nation out of the pact.

But the explosion of efforts to drive climate action forward - at local, national and international levels - nurtured hopes the global movement to tackle climate change has grown more powerful than any single government.

One important reason is that money is moving away from environmentally harmful projects into cleaner, greener investments. Renewable energy has become much cheaper, making it competitive with fossil fuels in many places.

And in a year set to notch up a new heat record, stoked partly by the El Niño phenomenon, governments stepped up concrete measures to protect their people from climate and weather extremes such as floods, droughts and storms.

As 2016 draws to a close, the Thomson Reuters Foundation asked experts to list the top five signs climate action is gathering speed. Here is a compilation of their views.

1. AGREEMENTS GALORE

The Paris Agreement on climate change took effect in November - 11 months after it was crafted by U.N. member states. Its swift entry into force was unexpected, but the prospect of a skeptical U.S. leader moving into the White House spurred international determination to push on with ratification.

At U.N. climate talks last month, governments gave themselves two years to hammer out the rules to put the Paris accord into practice and review national plans to keep temperature rise to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius.

In October, 191 countries in the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) agreed on a global carbon reduction and offsetting scheme for air travel.

That same month, 197 parties to the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer signed up to an amendment to phase down hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), one of the fastest growing and most potent greenhouse gases, used mainly in cooling and refrigeration.

2. FOSSIL FUELS LOSE FRIENDS

In May, the G7 group of wealthy countries set a deadline for the first time to end "inefficient" fossil fuel subsidies, encouraging all countries to do so by 2025, although the wider G20 shied away from a firm commitment at a later summit.

Meanwhile, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney led the charge to ramp up pressure on companies to heed the financial implications of their fossil fuel assets.

An international task force set up to prevent market shocks from global warming will ask companies to disclose how they manage risks to their business from climate change, as well as the impact of emissions cuts on their bottom line.

And a global campaign to persuade investors to pull their money out of fossil fuels gathered pace, doubling in size in 15 months, as the number of institutions that have committed to divest reached 688, representing $5.2 trillion in assets under management.

3. RENEWABLES STEAL THE LIMELIGHT

The International Energy Agency boosted its five-year growth forecast for renewable energy thanks to strong policy support in the United States, China, India and Mexico, and sharp cost reductions.

Renewables surpassed coal last year to become the largest source of installed power capacity in the world, it said.

Solar energy had a good year, as 2016 heralded the first solar-powered round-the-world flight, plans for roads paved with solar panels were announced for four continents, and Tesla Motors Inc. unveiled solar roof tiles.

A group of 48 developing states most at risk from climate change said they would strive to make their energy production 100 percent renewable as soon as possible before 2050.

4. PUSH TO PREPARE

Severe droughts linked to a powerful El Niño, hitting more than 60 million people, especially in southern Africa, reminded governments of the importance of preparing for weather and climate extremes by improving infrastructure, public services and food security.

Also In Global Energy NewsBlue skies return to Beijing, but dangerous smog still blankets northern ChinaActivist investor ramps up pressure on Shell to act on climate change

U.N. envoys drafted a blueprint to reduce the damage from such events in future, while aid agencies tested innovative ways to get money to where it's needed before a disaster strikes.

Meanwhile, developing states are working on national plans to adapt to climate change effects - including wild weather, rising seas and melting glaciers - backed with up to $3 million per country from the fledgling Green Climate Fund.

5. IN WITH THE CLIMATE CROWD

This year saw a flurry of initiatives to tackle climate change get underway or expand - involving businesses, investors, cities and local governments, among others.

For example, the Under2 Coalition, a club of sub-national governments that have committed to cut their emissions by at least 80 percent by 2020, grew its membership to 165, accounting for a third of the global economy.

And the Science Based Targets initiative said more than 200 companies had pledged to set emissions reduction targets in line with the global effort to keep temperature rise under 2 degrees.

"2016 truly marked the year of transition from endless talks and global negotiations on how to tackle climate change to moving into action by governments, provinces, cities, companies, parliaments and affected communities," said Saleemul Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD).

Thanks to continuing declines in solar and wind costs, the world added record amounts of renewable energy last year at the lowest prices ever , according to the United Nations. 55% of all new power came from renewables – one of the reasons emissions were flat in 2016 for the third year in a row.

Electricity from renewables rose 9% (139 gigawatts), while the cost to install all that dropped 23%.

Renewables now provide 11.3% of the world’s electricity, preventing 1.7 gigatons of carbon emissions a year.

“More for less” was the story of renewable energy in 2016. Global investment in renewables (excluding large hydro) fell by 23% to $241.6 billion, the lowest total since 2013, but there was record installation of renewable power capacity worldwide in 2016,” says the report.

Key Findings:

◾Investment in renewables was roughly double that of fossil fuels for the fifth consecutive year.

◾Costs to install solar PV, onshore wind and offshore wind were down 10%

◾Record investments in offshore wind, up 53% to $25.9 billion in Europe and China

◾Solar and wind prices reached record lows at power auctions – prices “that would have seemed inconceivably low only a few years ago.”

In 2017, about 85 gigawatts (GW) of solar will be added around the world, more than double that of 2014, and China is expected to add 30 GW of that. The US, China, Japan and India will dominate the market in 2017, with India overtaking Japan as the third-largest market, according to GTM Research.

For the first time, offshore wind will be built without any subsidies, as DONG Energy won an auction to build two offshore wind farms in Germany’s North Sea at super-low prices. The price to construct offshore wind farms is down 46% in the last five years – 22% in 2016 alone- reports Bloomberg.

China’s emissions WENT DOWN for the first time last year, dropping 1% even as the economy grew 6.7%, says the International Energy Agency. The US had the biggest drop in emissions at 3%.

US Renewables

Thanks to energy efficiency and renewables, US carbon emissions are 14% lower than 2005 levels – we are back to 1992 levels.

“Wind and solar are increasingly the lowest-cost resources getting connected to the grid, changing the investment calculus for utilities and dominating new capacity builds. Electricity demand nationwide continues to fall, even as millions more square feet of buildings are constructed. And in states across the country, distributed solar is decimating load growth,” says GTM Research.

56 GW of coal plants could close in the Midwest because the average cost of wind is $10/ megawatt-hour cheaper, according to Moody’s Investor Services.

San Diego slid past Los Angeles in 2016 as the most active solar market. Installations rose 60% to 303 megawatts (MW) – enough to power 76,000 homes. LA is in second place, followed by Honolulu and San Jose. The top 20 cities have nearly 2 GW of solar PV installed – about as much as the entire US at the end of 2010, says Shining Cities 2017: How Smart Local Policies are Expanding Solar Power in America.

California got 13% of its electricity from solar in 2016, according to the US Energy Information Agency.

Read our article, US Solar Grows 95% in 2016, In Best Year Ever.

Big Announcements

Chicago‘s mayor announced that all government buildings will run on 100% renewable energy by 2025, the most aggressive goal of any US city to date. For perspective, those buildings consume as much energy as 295,000 households. Two of the dirtiest coal plants in the country are also closing.

Florida is finally about to be a solar leader! Utility Florida Power & Light plans to install an incredible 2.7 GW of solar across the state in the next seven years – enough to power 420,000 homes. After it closes a second coal-fired power plant, solar will be the primary electricity source after natural gas.

New York State committed to 2.6 GW of offshore wind – the first major installation in the US. By 2030, wind will supply energy for 1.25 million homes.

Facebook announced it’s building another 100% wind-powered data center, this time in Nebraska on 144 acres – at least two 450,000 square-foot buildings.

The world’s largest beer-maker, Anheuser-Busch, announced it will run completely on renewables by 2025.

It joins 90 other companies and 25 U.S. cities – large and small – that have made this commitment. Cities range from Madison, Wisconsin to Abita Springs, Louisiana. Pueblo, Colorado is doing it to bring electric rates DOWN and get more reliable energy and Georgetown, Texas says wind and solar power are more predictable and lack the volatile prices of oil and gas – a contract signed today sets prices for the next 25 years.

Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory started manufacturing in January, bringing back battery production to the US, in addition to making the Model 3 electric car.

By 2018, the Gigafactory, which is a third complete, will double the world’s production capacity for lithium-ion batteries and employ 6,500 people. Besides building batteries for its vehicles – which could soon include trucks – Tesla is making batteries for homes and as back ups to the electric grid. 95% of components will be made in the US, including the enormous 70 MW solar array on the roof!